I have always trusted my gut. What I don’t trust is myself when I ignore it.
My paternal grandmother, Beulah, waited for my birth with real excitement. She was counting down, telling everybody a new grandbaby was coming, and then she transitioned less than two weeks before I was born. She never got to hold me. And I have believed since I was a little girl, without a shred of doubt, that she became my guardian angel the moment she left this earth, and that she has never once stopped watching over me.
That’s not a metaphor for me. That’s my actual religious experience. Part of how I understand God is that He allows our ancestors to hang out with us, to intercede in prayer on our behalf, to guide us toward peace and holiness even after they’re gone. Grandma Beulah has been talking to me since I was a child, and I have been talking back. Some folks call that intuition. That feeling that creeps up your spine and tells you to leave a place, a person, a situation. Your protection mechanism, kicking in before your brain catches up. For most people, that’s a psychological phenomenon. For me, it’s my grandmother, still doing her job.
And here’s the receipts on what happens when I don’t listen. Don’t go up those stairs. This man is not a good choice. Ask for more money. Every single time I brushed past that nudge and did the thing anyway, it came back and bit me. Every time. No exceptions, no lucky breaks where I got away with ignoring her. Following the path God has set in front of me requires her guidance, because left completely to my own devices, chile, I am a hot mess. Full code. Somebody git the paddles.
Now, for the people who need this in a language that doesn’t involve God, the Holy Spirit, and ancestors, here’s what psychology actually says about it. What we call a gut feeling has a real name, the somatic marker hypothesis, developed by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The theory says your body stores emotional memory as physical sensation, a tightening in your stomach, a flutter in your chest, and your brain uses those stored signals to steer you before your conscious, logical mind has finished working through the facts. Damasio’s most famous evidence came from patients with damage to a specific part of the brain who could still reason perfectly well on paper, list every pro and con, and still kept making terrible decisions, because the part of them that generated the gut feeling was gone. They had the logic. They’d lost the warning system. Researchers now also point to the gut-brain axis, the vagus nerve, and something called interoception, your brain’s ability to read your own body’s internal state, as part of how that warning system actually operates. Whether you call it a somatic marker or a grandmother, the science backs up what Black women have known forever, that feeling is information, and dismissing it has a cost.
Women’s intuition is a superpower, and most of us are walking around with it switched to low power mode. There are reasons for that, and they’re not flattering to the world we live in. We’ve been gaslit so consistently, so systematically, by a patriarchy that profits off us doubting ourselves, that we’ve started treating our own internal alarm system as the unreliable one instead of the men and institutions actually lying to us. And some of us are just tired. Bone tired, running on four hours of sleep and a to-do list that never ends, too exhausted to sit still long enough to hear what our own body is trying to tell us before we walk into the thing we already knew not to walk into.
So, here’s my funny, not-so-funny ending. I am, apparently, still learning how to shut up and listen, at an age where you’d think I’d have this handled by now. Grandma Beulah is up there shaking her head, I guarantee it. But the goal isn’t perfection, it’s getting quiet enough, often enough, to actually hear what God, and Grandma, are trying to tell me before I need the paddles again. Find yourself a quiet minute today. Sit still. Listen for real. One or some of your ancestors are talking to you. They’ve probably been talking the whole time.
What’s your gut telling you right now that you’ve been ignoring? Tell me in the comments.
